For most capital markets firms, risk and regulationare basic elements of the natural business environ-ment.Pricing and repackaging risk are, after all, theindustry’s core competencies, and some degree of regulation has always been the tradeoff for politicaland economic stability. Managing risks and assur-ing compliance are essential operating functions,and the IT solutions that support them are impor-tant components of enterprise infrastructure.

Today, capital markets firms face increasingrisk management and compliance demands. It’snot news that a few corporate scandals and globalinstabilities have brought new public scrutinyand regulatory intervention, or that recessionand globalization have roiled markets,multipliedbusiness risks and depressed earnings. Financialservice leaders are responding to these challengeswith a spirit of continuous innovation towardtheir business process and the supporting technol-ogy.They are modernizing their IT infrastructure,implementing business process best practices, anddeploying new solutions that utilize and buildupon these efficiencies.What some managers seeas routine technology upgrades, visionary execu-tives understand as investments in new revenueand growth opportunities.

Today’s Risk and Compliance NeedsLead to Innovative Technology SolutionsTo understand how infrastructure modernization fuelscorporate growth, one must first understand the separatebut converging technology requirements for risk andcompliance management.

Risk management Transaction volume and processingrequirements have gone through the roof as derivativesand other exotic instruments have come to dominate

many trading streams and portfolios. Providing cost-effective compute power to model and simulate theperformance of these instruments is a critical need. Inaddition, providing real-time risk management supportfor traders and asset managers requires a single portfolioview across many different systems and channels.This,in turn, demands improved data integration and man-agement capabilities and secure on-the-go access toreal-time information.

Compliance  Complexities here arise from the myriadnew regulations brought by national governments andinternational bodies, including Sarbanes-Oxley, the U.S.Patriot Act,Basel II and the many new anti-money laun-dering (AML) laws and regulations.Assuring complianceand creating robust archives requires the ability to track,record and respond to transactions across the entireenterprise—a massive integration and processing task.

Risk Management and ComplianceSolutions Catalyze New Business GrowthDefensive technology requirements provide the platform

for competitive advantage and revenue expansion

By Mark Stahl

Global Financial Services Industry Solution

Manager, Intel Corporation

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A Modernized Infrastructure Enables SolutionsToday’s r isk and compliance needs present three keytechnology requirements:• Global transaction and asset data integration for a

unified real-time view of enterprise positions andtrading activity.Today, most of this data is scatteredand isolated in many separate backend systems andindependent applications

• Greater computing power for real-time risk model-ing, simulation, and trade product pricing

• Global data aggregation and reporting solutions toenable real-time, holistic data views and to push cur-rent, actionable information and alerts to front-linedecision makers

Many financial service companies are already modern-izing their infrastructure to enable these capabilities,implementing service-oriented architectures for enter-prise integration, distributed compute Grids for intensivereal-time analysis,or fleets of mobile,wireless notebooks,tablets and handheld devices for instant awareness andfaster responses.The efficiencies that result slash cycletimes and process steps, boost productivity and sharpendecision-making with real-time precision data.

The companies that will lead the industry going for-ward understand that re-architecting their infrastructureto be more robust, flexible and scalable offers somepowerful competitive advantages.

A Vision for Business TransformationWhile risk management and compliance requirementsare top of mind, smart managers are keeping a closeeye on their competitiveness within a changing busi-ness environment. After the worldwide consolidationand convergence of recent years, an improving globaleconomy presents a different set of challenges—creat-ing new business and revenue growth.The pressureis on to develop new products, roll out new services,retain existing customers, attract new ones and identifynew cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.Today, leadingfirms are continually evolving both their processes andtheir infrastructure to operate more efficiently, under-stand their businesses more clearly, see new opportuni-ties sooner and respond more swiftly to deliver realtop-line results.

The robust, open standards-based infrastructure neededto energize this transformation:• Uses a service-oriented architecture to link customer 

service channels and enterprise applications, and tomanage the resulting data flows with robust security

• Supports a consolidated enterprise data warehousethat enables a unified,near real-time view of globalpositions and events

• Enables distributed data processing to extend thecapacity of high-performance computing Grids andclusters to servers, desktops, laptops and handhelds

• Provides real-time access to data through wirelessnetworks and high-performance mobile laptop andhandheld devices.

This distributed solution infrastructure provides a widerange of business benefits, in risk and compliance man-agement applications and beyond. It scales and adaptscost-effectively to new requirements and regulatorydemands. It powers real-time decision support, reducesupgrade expense, and supports modular expansion for new business opportunities.

As the leading practitioner of open standards-basedtechnology innovation, Intel has worked with thefinancial services industry and with technology leadersto develop innovative solutions to critical industry busi-ness needs. Solutions based on Intel-powered servers,desktops, laptops and handhelds deliver reliable, robustperformance and vendor freedom of choice.

Put Innovative Risk Management andCompliance Solutions to Work TodayRisk management and compliance will always be partof the financial markets landscape. How firms addressthose needs today will impact their competitiveness far into the future.Although the need for infrastructurereinvestment is obvious and immediate, the best usesfor new capital are sometimes less clear.The challengefor C-level management is to see this juncture for whatit is—an opportunity for structural change that willmake those who choose wisely dramatically more effi-cient, responsive, competitive and profitable.

For More InformationTo learn more about how Intel is working to enableinnovative solutions in financial services, contact your Intel sales representative, or visitwww.intel.com/go/finance .

 Mark Stahl manages Intel Corporation’s globalmarketing and business development function for theFinancial Services Industry—including the banking,capital markets, and insurance segments. Mark has over twenty years experience in technology for the financialservices industry. His background prior to joining IntelCorporation is in Enterprise Sales to Fortune 100companies.

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